Donald Trump’s vile attack on immigrants pushes GOP further into a white nationalist party

Former President Donald Trump is continuing his push to solidify the Republican Party as nothing more than a far-right, white nationalist party.

The former president recently spoke at a campaign rally in New Hampshire, where he railed against immigrants: “They’re poisoning the blood of our country … They poison mental institutions and prisons all over the world. Not just in South America, not just the three or four countries that we think about, but all over the world they are coming into our country, from Africa, from Asia, all over the world. They’re pouring into our country, nobody’s even looking at them. They just come in. The crime is going to be tremendous. The terrorism is going to be … We built a tremendous piece of the wall and then we’re going to build more.”

While that reads as if an AI prompt was asked to generate an intoxicated and incoherent rant from Joseph Goebbels, that is indeed what Trump said.

Compare, for a moment, Donald Trump’s way of speaking about immigrants with how President Ronald Reagan spoke about immigrants:  “Other countries may seek to compete with us; but in one vital area, as a beacon of freedom and opportunity that draws the people of the world, no country on earth comes close. This, I believe, is one of the most important sources of America’s greatness.”

There is no doubt a serious problem at the southern border. Migrants and asylum seekers are trying to get to the United States by the millions in order to seek a better life for themselves and their families. Given the highly restrictive and limited avenues for people to legally migrate to the United States, and the inadequate resources to process migrants as they come, we get the scenes we get at the southern border.

The far right, including Donald Trump, want Americans to be fearful of these migrants in order to stifle any talk of opening up our immigration system. Donald Trump wants his supporters to judge  migrants as a threat to be rooted out and stopped, rather than given a fair chance at integrating into our nation.

Trumpism has poisoned the blood of the Republican Party, the American conservative movement and American political discourse.